everyday adventures in an ordinary classroom

Rethinking the Choice Board

One of the first things I did when switching to a more proficiency-based teaching model (and the subject of one of the earliest blog posts I made) was to ditch traditional homework in favor of a Choice Board due at the end of each unit. A Choice Board is a great way to incorporate student voices into your classroom, as it allows them to choose which assignments to pursue outside of class time and it can be a way to get students to interact with the language in a more authentic way (and is more interesting than a workbook page!).

My Choice Board has always had two parts – the top part, or the “written work” and the bottom portion, which are speaking prompts. I’ve been giving Choice Boards to all of my students for about three years now and I absolutely believe they are the biggest reason why my students are (generally) very comfortable speaking French in class and why the eventually become very proficient speakers. I do not spend a lot of time honoring the “silent period” of language acquisition and I do indeed force output, which can be a controversial topic in the SLA community. In my experience (and I’m hardly an expert) there are many kids who, if not forced to speak, simply won’t. With the Choice Board, they can accomplish a task whenever they are ready and in a one-on-one environment with me; that way, I can still assess how their speaking skills are developing and they don’t have to put themselves “out there” in front of their classmates if they aren’t ready yet.

That being said, this year I felt the need to start revamping some of my Choice Boards to better reflect improvements in my teaching practice. Before, the top “written work” was separated by the letters A, B, C in which A corresponded to vocabulary, B corresponded to grammar and C corresponded to culture. Students were to get a tic tac toe with each letter (A-B-C) in order to fulfill the top portion assignments. The vocabulary prompts tended to be things like “Draw a birthday party and label the elements” (eeeeek!) and the grammar prompts had things like, “Create a 10-question -ER verb quiz and an accompanying key, then quiz a classmate!” (oh mon Dieu!) The speaking prompts on the bottom were similary separated by topic.

I’ve evolved a little bit since then and have been working on revamping my Choice Board to make it more culturally and linguistically authentic. I definitely still have a long way to go, but the current version for French 2 is I think a baby step in the right direction. The prompts are still labeled A B C for organization (I still want the tic-tac-toe element) but there is (I hope) less isolation between grammar, vocabulary and culture. Some of the written tasks are not as authentic as I would like, but I think it’s a definite improvement over earlier versions.

The speaking tasks have remained mostly the same; I’m working on developing a way to present the information in a less visually-confusing way and to remove the linguistic segregation that is still present on the labels but does not really correspond to the given prompts. I’m open to suggestions!

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4 thoughts on “Rethinking the Choice Board”

I love your Choice Board! Merci – I’m going to incorporate it into my classroom. For rooms of the house, I also like to use http://www.parisattitude.com/fr because each room is listed separately with its picture to reinforce the new vocabulary.

I also agree that you must force students to speak. The most successful language learners (in school and out of school) are those who speak as much as possible. Even babies copy their parents’ intonation with their babbling which helps them form words quicker.

Hi Megan, Merci for sharing your choice board idea! Question – I know for the writing section students must complete tic-tac-toe, but is it the same for the speaking or are there different requirements?